In other Pitchfork news (because I'm a tool)...

My favorite new band, Guillemots, got reviewed yesterday! And it was a good review. Maybe now they'll get the hint and release a proper album. Everyone should check them out, because they're awesome.

Bad news, duders...

For those of you who don't pay attention to Pitchfork, or missed the news item, or didn't put two-and-two together, here's what's going on:

Built to Spill isn't playing at Foellinger this spring. They may reschedule for September, but who knows?

So this means the one show I was really looking forward to isn't actually happening. I admit to being fairly unfamiliar with BTS prior to hearing they were booked, but I've familiarized myself since and I was getting pretty damn excited. I mean, right now I'm listening to their just-leaked-this-week-OMG album You in Reverse and I've got tears in my eyes. Well, not really.

But on a more positive note, I can still see Nickel Creek. Not thrilling, perhaps, but I've heard they're solid live. They're a semi-poppy, bluegrass/country/folk trio. Very talented, and more than competant songwriters. I base this in part on hearing their first two albums about three years ago, but more importantly on two live tracks that I've heard of theirs.

They're covers of two songs off Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. And while I don't really prefer them to the original versions, the covers are inventive, distinctive, and of a generally high quality that gives me hope that the concert might be fun. Even if they're probably too established to need to do Wilco covers anymore. (At the end of IATTBYH, they segue into a bit from one of their early fan-favorites, incidentally. It's pretty neat.)

You can listen to the Nickel Creek songs now, thanks to my generosity. If you want You in Reverse, well, NYAH NYAH.*

Nickel Creek-I Am Trying to Break Your Heart (Live)
Nickel Creek-Poor Places (Live)




*Just kidding. You know how to reach me.

I know some people out there like Charles Burns, and in particular like Black Hole. You're within your rights to like it, but I definitely did not - I found it dull, labored, hollow and unchallenging. So, keeping within my rights, here are quotes I particularly agreed with from a review that I liked.

When I start reading the comics of someone dragged through the aesthetics of RAW, someone held up by his peers as having little equal, someone producing his long-awaited masterpiece, I excpect to find a creator working at the top of his game, armed with all the tools available to him. I expect to find a comics creator, someone who blends word and image, who employs the full language of comics at his disposal. Instead I find a book of illustrated prose. As beautiful as Burns' images are, they rarely do little more than show us what his captions have already told us.

Black Hole is a slight work. As a prose short story, it would appear very thin. As a novel, it would be viewed as a joke. I'm afraid, and a little bit ashamed, of a medium that has produced so few great works that this is held in such esteem.

His characters don't confuse horniness with love and never have sex without romance. Every act is perfect. They exhibit little humor, they stab at philosophy without asking the relevant questions.



I leave you with a meanspirited pic I made. Sorry, I'm annoyed with my own writing and art tonight. Maybe sometime later this week I'll share my frustrations concerning Jimmy Corrigan...

A bunch of short comments on songs
Bear with me...

Emitt Rhodes - Live 'til You Die: I got this from a blog where it was compared to early and good solo McCartney. That works for me. Emphasis on "good": it's simple, catchy, but meaningful.

Electric Light Orchestra - Fire on High: ELO annoys the hell out of me with their drum machines and progginess sometimes, but sometimes they get it right and those are good times. And this is one of those times.

The Beatles - You Never Give Me Your Money (Take 30): I YSI'd this because Mat made a comment about overproduction on the way home from the B&S concert. And while he was hearing Abbey Road and thinking of Let It Be, I thought he might enjoy hearing an early version of this song, which is my favorite on Abbey Road and probably one of my top Beatles songs, period. I don't think the album version is overproduced; as with most of George Martin's production work for the band, I think it sounds nigh-perfect. But for someone who does find the album too slick, here's an antidote.


Lovin' Spoonful - You Didn't Have To Be So Nice: John Sebastian, duders.

Pop Will Eat Itself - Wise Up! Sucker: That's Alan Moore, noted comics writer, doing the "she loves me/she loves me not" spoken word parts. And as we know from another PWEI song, "Alan Moore knows the score." Which is why he isn't going to go see the movie adaptation of V for Vendetta.

The Mamas and the Papas - Creeque Alley

This is a type of song the 60s didn't produce much. Lennon did it, maybe, and Bowie would debatably do it in the 70s, but The Mamas and the Papas were one of the first, as far as I can remember. And the nearest thing we have today is probably in rap, interestingly enough.
Bear with me...

This is a self-mythologizing song. It's a song about how the band got together, exclusively. There's no cloaking personal sentiments in universal terms, no attempts to make this relatable. It's about them, period. And yet it works, because of the magnificent harmonies and production; when the Mamas and the Papas got it right, they got it really right.

The song starts out before the band formed, and takes us through John Sebastian's two earlier groups, the Mugwumps and the Lovin' Spoonful. The former was a group that includes Mama Cass Elliot and Papa Denny Doherty, the latter is included not because of its relevance but because of the song's specific approach to history. Sebastian was not a member of The Mamas and Papas, just for the record. "Creeque Alley" is a story song, but a fun and aphoristic and highly compressed and selective one. One with digs at the Byrds in the form of a triple - triple! - pun ("McGuinn and McGuire still a-gettin higher" - on the charts, in terms of fame, and on drugs). One that refers to the group's earlier hit in its final line ("And California Dreamin' is becoming a reality...")

It's a very cool song for what it does with its lyric and with the idea of being in a band and with the idea of rewriting the folk tradition of storytelling into autobiography and self-mythology. But it wouldn't work if it weren't as catchy as it is. It's my favorite song of theirs to sing along to, hands down.

Sagittarius - My World Fell Down

It's a sad thing that so many prominant bands are obviously influenced by The Beatles and Stones and so few by The Beach Boys. Specifically, very few are clearly drawing on the groundbreaking production and song construction techniques Brian Wilson developed in the mid to late 60s.*
Bear with me...

Here's a band that did draw quite a bit from Wilson, especially in this song - clearly a product of a post-"Good Vibrations" world. There's the interspliced sections of song connecting into a single work, the harmonizing, the organ. The song falls short of Wilson's brilliant use of percussion but it makes up for it with an entirely random and bizarre segment of tape splicing in the middle of the song. It's so unexpected and out-of-place that somehow, for me, it works perfectly. This may be Sagittarius's best song, and it may be a bit derivative, but it's still very good - and, because of its openness about its influence, historically interesting.





*Short list of bands that utilize Wilson-esque cut-and-paste song construction techniques:
The Beatles themselves, on Side 2 of Abbey Road;
Todd Rundgren, who once actually re-recorded "Good Vibrations" for no apparent reason;
Super Furry Animals, in certain songs (though they're influenced by Wilson in other ways too);
The Olivia Tremor Control, who took the technique to its logical and ultimate conclusion in Black Foliage.

If I included prog or thought more, I might have a longer list. But Wilson was never prog, and that was the point.

Tommy Roe - Dizzy

My mom really likes this song. I like it too; it's not something with much depth to it, but it's catchy and fun and that's enough. There's a story that Tommy Roe heard the demo version of this song and refused to record it until the string part was added. If it's not apocryphal, it shows him to be very smart - because this song is fucking made by the string part.

This past week was significant for four reasons, which I will relate vaguely and in order of importance (not chronologically):

1. I didn't have an emotional/mental breakdown, or anything like it. Which was exciting!

2. I talked to someone I didn't expect to talk to.

3. I bought Cholula hot sauce and found it to be awesome. I'm now eating when I'm not at all hungry, just to have Cholula on it.

4. I fell behind on YSIs. I have a lot of catching up to do, because I also want to write on some older songs. So that's on the agenda for doing soon.

I can't really say anything to describe this:

I know the guy in this, too.